Froude's History of England

itherto
unexplained, save on that great historic law of Goldsmith's by which
Sir Archibald Alison would still explain the French Revolution -

'The dog, to serve his private ends,
Went mad, and bit the man?'

It will be answered by some, and perhaps rather angrily, that these
strictures are too sweeping; that there is arising, in a certain
quarter, a school of history books for young people of a far more
reverent tone, which tries to do full honour to the Church and her
work in the world. Those books of this school which we have seen, we
must reply, seem just as much wanting in real reverence for the past
as the school of Gibbon and Voltaire. It is not the past which they
reverence, but a few characters or facts eclectically picked out of
the past, and, for the most part, made to look beautiful by ignoring
all the features which will not suit their preconceived pseudo-ideal.
There is in these books a scarcely concealed dissatisfaction with the
whole course of the British mind since the Reformation, an